How to Use HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns Together

The return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns determines if a marketing department succeeds or fails. Without effective marketing campaign measurement, marketers put their budgets, teams, and external resources at risk for depletion or elimination. 

How do marketers measure the ROI of marketing campaigns? Ideally, marketers leverage the reporting tools in their customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools. 

Marketers using the HubSpot Salesforce integration have two strong options for measuring marketing campaign effectiveness: HubSpot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns.

In this article, we explore the Campaigns tool in HubSpot and Salesforce. We will outline how HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns differ and show you how to get the most value out of using HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns together. 

Understanding HubSpot Campaigns

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot leads the market as an all-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service tool. With HubSpot’s Smart CRM, companies work from a single source of truth across all departments. 

Their work feeds the CRM with more data to enrich marketing campaigns and empower sales and customer service to deepen relationships. In addition to the underlying CRM supporting all HubSpot Hubs, HubSpot provides industry-leading marketing automation capabilities. 

With HubSpot, marketers can create, execute, and measure multi-channel marketing campaigns from one tool.

What are HubSpot Campaigns?

HubSpot Campaigns are HubSpot’s way of filing together assets that belong to the same marketing campaign. 

Meaning assets supporting a singular goal. HubSpot Campaigns bridge the reporting gap between the individual marketing assets and the goal they’re working to achieve. 

Key Features and Functionalities of HubSpot Campaigns

1. Centralized Campaign Management. HubSpot provides a unified dashboard for planning, executing, and tracking your marketing campaigns. This centralized approach simplifies coordinating various campaign elements, including emails, social media posts, landing pages, and ads, ensuring a consistent and cohesive customer experience.
2. In-depth Analytics and Reporting. HubSpot's Campaigns tool offers real-time analytics and reporting, providing valuable insights into campaign performance. Track key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimize your marketing strategies.

Benefits of Using HubSpot Campaigns

HubSpot Campaigns are designed to show how effectively a collection of marketing assets achieves a goal. HubSpot Campaigns enable you to track the overall effectiveness of emails, landing pages, social media posts, workflows, and more all in one place.  

Campaigns can also be used to track budget, spending, and performance to goal for associated marketing assets. Marketers should use Campaigns to report on marketing performance across asset types easily.

Understanding Salesforce Campaigns

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform that helps businesses manage and analyze their interactions with customers and prospects. It provides tools for tracking leads, opportunities, and customer data to enhance engagement and drive business growth.

What are Salesforce Campaigns?

Salesforce Campaigns are organized initiatives within Salesforce CRM that allow businesses to plan, execute, and track marketing and promotional activities. They enable companies to target specific audiences, track campaign effectiveness, and manage various marketing elements such as leads, contacts, and opportunities associated with a particular campaign.

Key Features and Functionalities of Salesforce Campaigns

1. Campaign Creation and Management. The Salesforce Campaigns tool enables you to create a centralized account of all Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities influenced by a specific marketing or sales effort.
2. Campaign Hierarchies. To better track the impact of individual Campaigns that serve a higher Campaign goal, Salesforce Campaigns provides the ability to create hierarchies. For example, a marketing team may leverage this to create a Parent Campaign for “2023 Marketing” and Child Campaigns for Email Marketing, Organic Search, Paid Advertising, etc. This enables marketing to roll up overall performance to the Parent Campaign while maintaining reports on the influence of all Child Campaigns.
3. Campaign Members. The Campaign Member object adds a Lead or a Contact to a Campaign in Salesforce. This junction object enables the association between Leads and Contacts and their various Campaigns in Salesforce. Additionally, the Campaign Member object enables status tracking for Leads and Contacts in the Salesforce Campaign. 

Benefits of Using Salesforce Campaigns

Salesforce Campaigns make it easy to quantity Leads and Contacts associated with various marketing efforts - inbound or outbound. They also enable Salesforce users to track the stage of participation within a specific campaign using the Campaign Member object. 

For example, you can track if someone has been invited to an event as part of this campaign or if they’ve RSVP’d Yes or No. 

Salesforce Campaigns enable marketers to track high-level marketing campaign data in the primary CRM platform (Salesforce) to align sales and marketing teams better.

Using HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns Together

Why Salesforce Campaigns Do Not Sync with HubSpot

Now that we know how HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns benefit marketers, let’s discuss why they do not sync across platforms. 

In HubSpot, Campaigns are a reporting tool enabled by a single object, the Campaign object. The Campaign tool aggregates data across marketing assets associated with the Campaign. 

In Salesforce, Campaigns are also an object. But that is where the similarities end. 

Campaigns can be customized with custom fields and hierarchies. Campaigns are connected to Leads and Contacts by an additional object—Campaign Members. And, to support the Campaign influence reports that Salesforce provides, Campaigns are tied to the Opportunity object. 

To show statuses, Campaigns are also supported by an additional object—Campaign Member Status. Needless to say, the structure of Salesforce Campaigns is a bit complex. Explore it in this diagram provided by Salesforce.

So, why can’t we sync Salesforce Campaigns with HubSpot Campaigns? Because they are fundamentally different entities. HubSpot Campaigns report on marketing assets, whereas Salesforce Campaigns report on Campaign Members (Leads and Contacts) and how they’re associated with revenue (Opportunities). 

Because Salesforce Campaigns and HubSpot Campaigns do not have the same data structure, they are not included in the native HubSpot Salesforce integration.

Workaround to Integrate Salesforce Campaigns with HubSpot

This isn’t necessarily recommended, but there is a way to get Salesforce Campaign data in HubSpot. 

Here are the details of this workaround:

• It does not sync the Salesforce Campaign Object with HubSpot Campaigns.
• It does not enable the creation of Salesforce Campaigns from HubSpot.
• It does not enable the creation of HubSpot Campaigns from Salesforce.
• It does involve a HubSpot Custom Object (available in HubSpot Enterprise Plans).
• It does not require a custom API or a Developer. 
• It does not enable visibility for Campaign Member Status in HubSpot.

To add Salesforce Campaigns in HubSpot, create a Custom Object in HubSpot. Then, navigate to the integration settings to add a Custom Object to the integration. The integration process will configure the associations between the Custom Campaign Object, Contacts, and Deals in HubSpot to mirror those in Salesforce.

As of February 2024, there is now a new Beta in HubSpot to allow bidirectional custom object sync between HubSpot and Salesforce. You can now use this solution bidirectionally between HubSpot and Salesforce to create Campaigns and Campaign Members in Salesforce manually in HubSpot or via HubSpot Workflows. 

How to Leverage Salesforce Campaigns from HubSpot

While you can’t sync Salesforce Campaigns to HubSpot Campaigns, you can leverage Salesforce Campaign data from HubSpot. You can also manage Campaign Members from HubSpot Workflows. Here’s how to work with Salesforce Campaigns from HubSpot.

1. HubSpot Workflows. Using Contact-based Workflows, you can use the Set Salesforce campaign Workflow action to create a Campaign Member in Salesforce AND set or update Campaign Member Status.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Salesforce Campaign IDs property. The HubSpot Salesforce integration creates a custom property in HubSpot on the Contact object called Salesforce Campaign IDs. This property is automatically updated by Salesforce with the name of each Salesforce Campaign the HubSpot Contact is associated with in Salesforce. This does not show you the Campaign Member Status but allows you to filter, personalize emails, and report based on Salesforce Campaign association from HubSpot.
   
   

How to Use HubSpot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns Together

Now that we’ve thoroughly examined HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns, how can marketers and sales teams use both HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns to their advantage? There’s no one best way to approach it, and you will get many different answers depending on who you ask. 

Rather than indicate the “best” way, here is an idea for leveraging the Campaign tools together. The most important action to take is strategically planning how to use both tools, creating a naming convention and documentation, and training your team to use HubSpot and Salesforce campaigns. 

Example: Tracking Webinars with HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns

Scenario

Suzy is the VP of Marketing at Orange Sneakers. She is using the HubSpot Salesforce integration. Her BDR and Sales teams work out of Salesforce, and her Marketing team works out of HubSpot. 

At the end of the year, Suzy will need to report on how much revenue was influenced by Webinars. Throughout the year, Suzy must ensure the marketing team constantly optimizes their marketing efforts to improve Webinar performance. 

After each Webinar, the Sales team is accountable for following up with each Webinar attendee, but they should only follow up with people who attended, not everyone who registered.

Plan of Action

1. End of Year Reporting. Suzy will design her Campaign structure in December to track her efforts throughout the year. She will create one Salesforce Parent Campaign for all of the Webinars in the upcoming year. Then, throughout the year, a Child Campaign will be created in Salesforce for each Webinar the company hosts. At the end of the year, Suzy can use these Campaigns to report on Campaign Influence and the volume of Leads and Opportunities created by Webinars.
   
   
   
   
2. Campaign Member Creation. For Marketing to enable Campaign reporting in Salesforce from HubSpot, a Workflow will be created for each Webinar registration. When a HubSpot Contact registers for a Webinar, they will be enrolled into a HubSpot Workflow that will add them to the Salesforce Campaign for that Webinar and update their Campaign Member Status to Responded.
   
   
   
   
3. Campaign Member Status Update. Marketing will create an Additional HubSpot Workflow for each Webinar to enable the Sales team to follow up with only Campaign Members who attended the Webinar. This Workflow will enroll Contacts when they’ve attended the Webinar. Then, the Workflow will update their Campaign Member Status to Attended and create a Salesforce Task for Sales to follow up with them.
   
   
   
   
4. Marketing Performance Tracking. To ensure that the marketing team improves their efforts over time, Suzy will leverage the HubSpot Campaigns tool. She will create a HubSpot Campaign for each Webinar hosted during the year. Then, all emails, landing pages, social posts, etc., created for the event will be associated with the Campaign in HubSpot. After each event, Suzy will use the Compare Campaigns tool to monitor how this Webinar compares to the Previous Webinar. Using this data, she will coach the marketing team on performance and optimize it throughout the year.
   
   

Getting Started with HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns

In conclusion, measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns is crucial for the success of any marketing department. By using tools like HubSpot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns, marketers can effectively track and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

While these two platforms have different structures and do not fully sync with each other, there are workarounds to integrate Salesforce Campaign data into HubSpot. 

Marketers and sales teams can gain valuable insights and optimize their marketing efforts by strategically planning and leveraging HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns. So, whether you are using HubSpot, Salesforce, or both, taking advantage of these campaign tools is important to drive success in your marketing campaigns.

Looking to learn more about the HubSpot Salesforce Integration? Check out our HubSpot Salesforce Integration Certification course.

FAQs

How does HubSpot integrate with Salesforce?

HubSpot integrates with Salesforce through a native API, allowing rudimentary communication between the two platforms. Users can set up the integration by connecting their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts and configuring data synchronization settings for contacts, leads, opportunities, and other relevant information. However, not all data will be synced accordingly, and custom objects and other procedures listed above will be required to sync both campaigns seamlessly.

Can I sync custom fields between HubSpot and Salesforce?

Yes, you can sync custom fields between HubSpot and Salesforce. When setting up the integration, you can map custom fields in both platforms to ensure the data is synchronized accurately. This allows you to maintain consistency and capture all relevant information across both systems.

What are the key differences between HubSpot and Salesforce campaigns?

HubSpot campaigns primarily focus on inbound marketing strategies, such as content marketing, email marketing, and lead nurturing. Salesforce campaigns, on the other hand, are more aligned with traditional sales and marketing tactics, such as lead generation, pipeline management, and ROI tracking. While both platforms offer campaign management features, they serve different purposes and cater to distinct aspects of the marketing and sales process.

How can I track campaign ROI in HubSpot and Salesforce?

In HubSpot, you can track campaign ROI through its reporting dashboard, which provides insights into metrics such as traffic, leads generated, and conversion rates attributed to specific campaigns. In Salesforce, you can leverage campaign tracking features to monitor the effectiveness of marketing efforts in generating revenue and closing deals. Integrating both platforms gives you a comprehensive view of campaign performance and ROI across the entire sales funnel.